Sure, Daniel Day-Lewis played a wicked Lincoln, but did you know his godfather was… Ralph Vaughan Williams?

I was stunned to learn this myself, but it makes perfect sense, as Day-Lewis’ father, Cecil Day Lewis was a friend and associate of the composer.

He wrote the following letter to Vaughan Williams on the eve of his 80th birthday, October 12, 1952:

Dear R.V.W.

Will you accept this, as a very small return for all the pleasure & inspiration your music has given me? If you were ever moved to set the sonnet-sequence here, O Dreams O Destinations, (I’ve often thought it might interest a composer), it would be a wonderful thing for me.

Yours sincerely

C. Day Lewis

It’s speculated the letter accompanied a copy of “The Poems of C. Day Lewis,” in the Penguin Poets series, which Vaughan Williams selected as one of the books of the year for an article in London’s The Sunday Times.

You’ll find the text of “O Dreams, O Destinations” at the link:

https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10006142

Around the same time, Day Lewis stepped up to take the role of speaker in “An Oxford Elegy” at a Vaughan Williams birthday concert.

The poet also narrated the belated first performance of Vaughan Williams’ “Epithalamion,” which was composed in 1938-9 (as “The Bridal Day”). With the outbreak of World War II, the work was put away in a trunk, receiving its televised premiere, finally, on June 5, 1953.

At Vaughan Williams’ 85th birthday celebration, Day Lewis provided the following encomium. I could not find a printed copy (I transcribe from the audio), so the format and punctuation are my own.

O Prospero,

You have made for us

A brave new world of harmony,

Where discords are resolved by art,

Born of true magnanimity.

Ancient Ariel,

Your music shall fly on,

As now it flies,

Girdling with joy our trouble earth,

From Wenlock to the Antarctic skies.

Sir,

You have many friends;

Accept their birthday wish:

May God keep safe and bless

Our 85 year-old Ariel,

Prospero,

Uncle Ralph!

Daniel Daniel Day-Lewis was born in April 29, 1957, 16 months before Vaughan Williams’ death. Cecil Day Lewis served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his own passing in 1972.

The actor restored the hyphen to his double-barreled surname, originally a pretense on the part of his grandfather, who combined the surnames of his own birth father (Day) and adoptive father (Lewis) in a bid for greater respectability. It is a bid C. Day Lewis symbolically rejected.